Edit File: perlfreebsd.pod
If you read this file _as_is_, just ignore the funny characters you see. It is written in the POD format (see pod/perlpod.pod) which is specifically designed to be readable as is. =head1 NAME perlfreebsd - Perl version 5 on FreeBSD systems =head1 DESCRIPTION This document describes various features of FreeBSD that will affect how Perl version 5 (hereafter just Perl) is compiled and/or runs. =head2 FreeBSD core dumps from readdir_r with ithreads When perl is configured to use ithreads, it will use re-entrant library calls in preference to non-re-entrant versions. There is a bug in FreeBSD's C<readdir_r> function in versions 4.5 and earlier that can cause a SEGV when reading large directories. A patch for FreeBSD libc is available (see http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=misc/30631 ) which has been integrated into FreeBSD 4.6. =head2 $^X doesn't always contain a full path in FreeBSD perl sets C<$^X> where possible to a full path by asking the operating system. On FreeBSD the full path of the perl interpreter is found by using C<sysctl> with C<KERN_PROC_PATHNAME> if that is supported, else by reading the symlink F</proc/curproc/file>. FreeBSD 7 and earlier has a bug where either approach sometimes returns an incorrect value (see http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=35703 ). In these cases perl will fall back to the old behaviour of using C's argv[0] value for C<$^X>. =head1 AUTHOR Nicholas Clark <nick@ccl4.org>, collating wisdom supplied by Slaven Rezic and Tim Bunce. Please report any errors, updates, or suggestions to F<perlbug@perl.org>.